Background

This is an incredibly challenging target to tackle from city skies! It’s very faint, and is actually close to the Shark Nebula. Like the Shark, the Rotten Fish is a broadband target and so doesn’t benefit from narrowband filters like the Optolong L-Ultimate. So, very long integration times are needed to achieve a respectable signal-to-noise ratio — although this image is a bit of an experiment…

Optolong Optics have kindly sent me one of their brand new filters, the L-Quad Enhance. This is a broadband light pollution filter, so in theory ideal for targets like the Rotten Fish. Click here to read my review. For this target, I captured 10 hours of data with no filter; and 14 hours with the L-Quad Enhance. I’ll show a fair comparison in the eventual review, but for now this image is the result of integrating all 24 hours. To be honest it could do with longer, as it’s still fairly noisy, but hopefully that’s not too noticeable so long as you’re not pixel-peeping. I was also plagued by tech issues — specifically, my camera disconnecting — that knocked a few clear skies on the head.